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- Our pool cover kept the pool at tolerable temps (mid-high 70s) until a few days after Halloween. Then the nights got cold fast, and we finally removed the cover, cleaned it off, rolled it up, and put it in the shed. Water temp is now 62 degrees. I’m sure I’ve been in water that cold, but as a successful retired person, I reserve the right not to do things I did gladly when I was in seventh grade. As for when it goes back on in the spring, well, I’m working on that. We’ll see.
- QBit is still with us, though he’s a little grumpy and not moving as fast as he used to. He does not appear to be in pain, but we’re having the mobile vet check him again at the end of the month.
- We’ll be watching fistfights about this for years still, but ongoing research is pushing consensus strongly toward the hypothesis that low-carb high-fat diets accelerate metabolism. This happens to me almost every day: Twenty minutes after my nearly zero-carb breakfast (two eggs fried in butter, coffee, sometimes bacon) I feel warmer and start to sweat under my arms.
- From the Things-Are-Not-Working-Out-As-We-Were-Promised Department: When we bought our house here in Phoenix in 2015, we immediately replaced nearly all the interior lighting with LED devices. Three years later, they’re dying like flies. (Several died within the first year.) Probably half of the incandescent bulbs we had in our Colorado house survived for all the 12 years we lived there. More efficient, yes. Long-lasting, well, I giggle.
- The Center for Disease Control warns Americans not to eat Romaine lettuce in any form. A particularly virulent form of e. coli has been found in lettuce sold in 11 states, but since the CDC doesn’t know where all the infected lettuce came from, it’s advising consumers not to eat romaine at all.
- The Dark Ages began with real darkness: In the year 536 a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland covered Europe in volcanic smog. Crops failed, famine was everywhere, and soon came Justinian’s Plague, now thought to be bubonic plage. By the time the plague faded out, half of Europe was dead. I find it fascinating that we can identify periods of prosperity by looking for lead dust in ice cores, meaning that people were mining precious metals. After nearly vanishing after 536, lead levels didn’t reach the norm again until 640.
- “Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy.” –Pam Allyn
- Statuary in ancient Greece and Rome was not always blinding white, but was often painted and sometimes gilded, and restorations of the colors are startling to moderns. Here’s an excellent long-form piece on how old statues likely appeared when they were created–and why many historians reject the idea of painted Classical statuary.
- Too much caffeine triggers the release of cortisol, which in large quantities over a period of time leads pretty directly to heart disease. Modern life is cortisol-rich enough enough without downing 6 cups a day!
- Some ugly stats quoted by Nicholas Kristof: “38 colleges, including five from the Ivy League, had more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. Over all, children from the top 1% are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League colleges than children from the bottom 20%.” Legacy admissions have got to go.
- IDC says that desktop PC sales will drop by 7.6% in 2013. This may well be due to what I call the Silverware Effect: PCs are pretty damned good, aren’t getting better very quickly, and people are keeping them way longer than they used to. Good ones can be had dirt-cheap. (And the dirt-cheap ones don’t have Windows 8 sticking to their boots!) Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
- And a leaked screen shot seems to indicate that Microsoft heeded the technopeasants with torches and pitchforks: With Windows 8.1, the Start button is back!
- A day later, Ars published a much more detailed look at Windows 8.1.
- While some people still struggle to get their Raspberry Pi keyboards to stop stuttering, other people are writing brand-new operating systems for it. I know one of those guys, and if he wants to announce here, I’ll applaud!
- The Siberian Times reports that a frozen mammoth carcass yielded a surprise: Blood. The other surprise in this story is that there’s an English-language publication called the Siberian Times.
- A third surprise was how much cool stuff is published in the Siberian Times.
- That all the commenters in the Siberian Times appear to be Americans somehow comes as no surprise.
- In 2008, NOAA predicted that the Cycle 24 sunpost maximum would take place in May 2013. A quick look at my watch suggests that it’s over. So does a quick look at the sunspot graphs. After the second hump, it’s all over but the plunging.
- As much as people scream when anyone says so, talent trumps practice. 10,000 hours will make you better if you have talent, but it won’t make you better without the natural gifts to excel in your chosen field. Choose the wrong field, and all the practice you might attempt won’t make you great.
- Moore’s Law seems to be stalling, on NAND flash memory, at least.
- Twenty home technologies that were way ahead of their time. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The husband of a local rising star in bichon grooming is a comics artist. And he is beyond amazing.
- One of the few things I miss about California is the Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale. Ars has a photo tour that makes it look precisely the way I remember it looking in 1989. (I guess that makes it a “comfort junk shop.”)
- I haven’t laughed out lout at PVP in a long time, but today’s strip did it.
- Physicists have created quantum entanglement between two photons that don’t exist at the same time. If my head didn’t hurt before, it hurts now. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
- We thought we knew what organism caused the mid-19th century potato famine in Ireland, but we were wrong.
